This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities

Calling This Gaming Life a book about video games is a misnomer. Video games — or the love of gaming, more accurately — is at the core, but it’s also part travelogue, part commentary on community, and part personal reflection As much as the book bounces around from topic to topic, it stays glued together [...]

Crumbtown

Joe Connelly’s Bringing Out the Dead was the rare novel that was as lyrical as it was streetwise, as if Raymond Chandler wrote a novel about paramedics that were slumming lower than their wards. The story of healers in search of healing — emotional, existential — was laid gently across the pages, cathartic and not [...]

Auralia’s Colors

Genre fiction often gets a bad rap for following blueprints drawn up by great predecessors. The bad rap is often deserved; as much as I like mysteries, I’m fine with never reading another story with a crafty serial killer or wise, eccentric European gumshoe.
So when I say Auralia’s Colors is a different sort of fantasy [...]

Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge

Asia Times reporter Pepe Escobar likens his book Red Zone Blues to a series of blues songs, short blurbs that capture the sad song of life in Iraq during the 2007 troop surge. It sounds like it could work but ultimately does not.
Escobar bookends the book with segments padded with hyper-kinetic prose and slivers of [...]

Enchantment

Orson Scott Card’s Enchantment is a retooled, contemporary take on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale. But it also feels like a 1990s version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Card uses the modern setting–and some contemporary moral questions–without mauling the source material too much, providing a surprisingly deep and entertaining read.
Ivan Smetski [...]